D’oh! A reader points out the flaws in the this post:

It certainly will not reduce emissions. Being small units, they will have lower combustion temperatures than large gas-fired units. Hence, less complete combustion of fuel, and hence more pollutants. I remind you of the history of home heating over the past century. Before WW2, most homes were heated by coal-fired furnaces. As a result, cities were an air-polluted mess. A combination of gas and electric heating largely removed this, but what this proposal does will add enormously to the combustion sources within individual homes. The history of heating generation is that pollutants are always far more easily controlled by using a few very large sources than tens of thousands of small ones. Since one of the explicit intentions of the program is to displace nuclear, it becomes truly mysterious as to how such a proposal reduces emissions.
Second, such a program requires net metering of every household by the utility. Who pays this huge added distribution cost, the utility or the generator? Usually the utility does for no net benefit, as rate setting bodies are all too prone to giving alternative generators free utility hookups, meaning the utility is forced to absorb the cost itself.
There’s also the factor of safety. Methane is a highly combustible substance, and this stupid program proposes placing a gas-fired generator in every household basement. Before you do that, you’d better have a safety analysis done as to how many additional home explosions will occur on an annual basis and what the expected fatalities will be.
It is of course regressive in nature. Naturally, there will be considerable household capital cost for this. And naturally there will be at least some subsidization by government. So we will have the vicious situation of the poor who cannot afford to benefit from such a program paying taxes to provide a benefit for the rich who can afford the capital cost.
There’s the question of supply. Home gas lines are sized to power appliances like water heaters and furnaces. Now you’re looking at the prospect of a very large increase in household gas supply capacity. So you need to add in costs where necessary for increasing this (ripped up streets for larger mains, etc.)
As to the absurd notion of providing net power to the grid, someone should ask the distribution utilities how they plan to manage the resulting power quality problems.
Of course the biggest question of all still remains. Just where precisely is Germany to get all the gas for this? Somewhere, Vladimir Putin is smiling.